


As Smoke To Flame

by williamshooketh



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Betrayal, Canon-Typical Violence, Developing Relationship, Guilt, Introspection, Literary References & Allusions, M/M, Oral Sex, Pre-Episode: s02e13 Mizumono, Rape/Non-con Elements, Relationship Study, Unhealthy Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-06
Updated: 2018-04-06
Packaged: 2019-04-19 03:22:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,279
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14228070
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/williamshooketh/pseuds/williamshooketh
Summary: So we’ll make a deal, you and I,he thought. Hannibal’s hand was heavy on the small of his back.I’ll finish him myself. Just let me have this. Just one more night. Just one more night.Will knows he will have to betray Hannibal eventually. It's just a matter of denial until he does.





	As Smoke To Flame

**Author's Note:**

> Back at it again at Krispy Kreme.

 Fucking. The word had a hard, curt sound that Will couldn’t make himself apply to the context of Hannibal Lecter. _Are you a fucker or a make-lover?_ a not-very-close friend had once asked him at a party at university, and Will hadn’t known how to reply except to say that he probably wasn’t much of either. None of his scanty partners had ever weighed in on the subject. He got some attention back then, but not much—he was always the weird, quiet one that people tended to avoid because he made them uncomfortable.

_Are you a fucker or a make-lover?_ He wasn’t either, and he suspected that Hannibal was neither one as well. Sometimes Will wondered if he had any sort of passion at all beyond his clear love of culture and the arts, but then he would catch the faintest glint in his therapist’s eye that suggested he looked at Will with something beyond the affable affection one reserves for one’s friends. 

No, they didn’t fuck the first couple of times. But they _were_ intimate. Hannibal behind him at the dinner table and filling his wine glass, one hand on the back of his chair and his breath ruffling Will’s hair. Standing in his kitchen and watching him dress each plate with the precision of a clockmaker. _Presentation is half of every meal,_ he explained to him. And then: _why not stay for the evening?_

Will, idly rolling an empty wine bottle in his hands: _Don’t want to be a waste of space._

Hannibal, so casual that he might be commenting on the weather: _I don’t think you’re a waste of space._

Sad to think how those words alone, later that night as he jerked off in the shower like a teenager, were enough to push him over the edge. 

 

He supposed the cruelty would have to count as intimacy too, in its way: you had to know someone awfully well to frame them for serial murder, didn’t you? And as for driving someone out-of-their-skull, flat fucking insane… He did it with impressive skill, Will gave him that. He drove him back to the fucking Hobbes’s place just to tip him that little bit further toward the edge. And had the courtesy to put a blanket over him while he dozed in his car during the trip.

And, fine, the tube and the ear was intimate too, if you wanted to be literal. If you wanted to be literal, that was the first time Hannibal was ever inside him. For that reason, perhaps it was right that to think about it only made him feel raped. (He wouldn’t ever get over that one: food that lay too heavily on his tongue or didn’t go down his throat the right way made him nauseous; and the two times he ever sucked Hannibal’s cock were each followed with vomiting hard into the toilet, streaming eyes and stinging throat. Bile and semen and whatever delicacy they’d had for dinner).

Cruelty was intimacy with different clothes on and a different name. When they did touch each other, finally, it was because of the cruelty _and_ the tenderness. In, of all places, a deserted exhibit of the Museum of Natural History. Randall Tier’s remains were just upstairs. They walked away from the scene together, the sleeves of their coats brushing and their knuckles brushing too as their arms swung: back and forth, back and forth. Down the staircase. Across the corridor.

Nothing was said. Nothing needed to be said. They ducked into an exhibit at random—some showcase on the flight patterns of birds, a documentary narrated by some British actress—and Will turned to face him. His pulse was elevated. As Hannibal took a step toward him and Will’s back brushed the wall, his mouth began to water. 

He touched Will’s face first, his thumb skimming over the dip in his upper lip and down onto his lower one, gently pulling them apart. Will flicked his tongue against his nail bed, pushed Hannibal’s hand out of the way, and brought their mouths together. 

It was more chaste than it should have been, as Hannibal cradled Will’s face in his hands, and Will rested his own on his chest, tightening his grip on his lapels when Hannibal broke away for breath. 

“Don’t,” he muttered. Eyes closed. “Just don’t.” 

And so Hannibal tilted his chin up with a finger and kissed him again. Tongue and hot flashes of breath against his face when they came up for air. Hannibal was stroking one of his earlobes with the tip of his forefinger. Will raked his fingers through Hannibal’s hair and was left panting when Hannibal kissed his way across the line of his jaw to bite down on his ear. 

Where was it going? What were they doing? Will didn’t know. At present, as Hannibal moved his mouth down his neck and his hands fumbled for the zipper of his trousers, Will wasn’t even sure of what side he was meant to be playing. He had killed Randall, and he had liked killing Randall. And now Hannibal kissing his mouth. Hannibal drawing him out—he was half-hard already. Hannibal kneeling in front of him. 

The velvet warmth of his mouth. The maroon darkness of his eyes. 

He finished in Hannibal’s mouth and dropped, weak-kneed, to the floor in front of him. When he laid his fingers over Hannibal’s mouth, Hannibal pursed his lips against them. There was a fleeting moment of eye contact. 

Will laid his head on his shoulder and let him stroke his hair.

 

As always with Hannibal, they proceeded to that final point by degrees. Returning to Wolf Trap was out of the question; they went to Hannibal’s home instead. It was silently understood that Will had the run of the place, but he found himself seeking out his host’s company all the same. He leaned on the kitchen counter with a glass of _sauvignon blanc_ and watched Hannibal prepare dinner— _confit de canard._ Watched his hands, the line of his back. Once, just once, after washing his hands, Hannibal turned to him, cupped his face in his hands, and kissed him. Long, with a closed mouth.

They ate. There wasn’t much conversation. When he filled Will’s glass again, he laid his hand not on the back of the chair, but on his shoulder. Warm and heavy.

“If you like,” he told Will after their plates were empty, “you can stay the night.”

Will nodded. 

“Your eyes,” Hannibal added. 

“What about them?”

“They look frightened.” Which was the polite way of saying that he could smell his fear.

Will held his gaze, looking not into his eyes but between them. “I’m not afraid,” he said. 

Something sparked in Hannibal’s expression, like a challenge. 

Will wiped his mouth with his napkin, stood, and walked to the opposite end of the table. Methodically, he began moving the dishes out of the way, toward the center. Then he sat down on it, directly in front of Hannibal.

“I’ll prove it to you,” he told him and wrapped his hand around his tie. 

 

There were new definitions of intimacy that Will was only beginning to learn. The wrapping of gauze around his split knuckles. The point of the knife that just grazed the delicate skin of Hannibal’s throat as they locked eyes. 

The body was a miracle. He hadn’t fully understood the wonder of all those muscles and bones and flesh knit together to make the self until he’d begun working with the FBI again. How fragile humans are, how easily ripped apart and stitched into something new, something that, Will can’t help but feel, is somehow more correct. 

He hadn’t fully understood the body’s capacity for pleasure until he’d slept with Hannibal. At its most basic, pleasure was a matter of nerves, nothing more. But touching Hannibal felt like something else altogether. It felt like completion.Hannibal’s arms around him, his mouth on his throat and fingers in his hair, scratching his scalp. Will didn’t like penetrative sex: really, he didn’t like sex at all; there was too much intimacy for his body and his too-sensitive mind to process. But sex—in any way, in every way—felt necessary with Hannibal. Not because he felt pressured. There was a mutual expectation, yes, but Hannibal was almost absurdly concerned that Will have the ability to refuse him. Sex was necessary because he couldn’t have the killing with him, and that left few options. But sex was also necessary because sometimes, when Hannibal sat near him—so close and yet not touching him, the woodsy musk of his cologne lingering in the room after he left—he thought he might go mad with the need of his body on his. 

The first time he fucked Hannibal, it was on the bed the first evening he had stayed with him, and Will had shoved his head down into the pillows, and Hannibal had seized his wrist and left bruises. Even when he had control, he couldn’t escape unmarked. Even when he was the one who fucked harder, it seemed to have no effect. As though humoring him, Hannibal would lie there afterward and let him hold him. All the time, there was the unspoken understanding that Hannibal deserved to be hurt, and that, nonetheless, he wasn’t going to give Will the satisfaction.

The first time Hannibal fucked him, it was on a clear, sunny winter morning two nights after they had first slept together. Will straddled his lap and let him suck mark after mark into his throat, his shoulder, his chest. Will left his back bleeding. 

He couldn’t walk afterward. Hannibal brought him coffee in bed and sat with him while he drank it, letting him lean his head on his chest while he stroked his hair. He felt helpless and he hated it, almost as much as he hated how he relished Hannibal’s attention.

Hannibal would read out loud afterward or before— _The Iliad,_ or else Keats or Pope or Milton. And Will, who knew his role by heart, would kiss his shoulder until he put the book down if it was before. If it was after, he would lie beside him in the lamplight and let his voice lull him to sleep. Funny, how easy it became to sleep beside a killer after you too had taken a life.

 

How long had he wanted this? Rather, how long had he known what Hannibal was and wanted this? Had lain on the hard bed in his cell and closed his eyes and dreamed of death and his hands around Hannibal’s neck and the hard rock, rock, rock of their hips? He hadn’t wanted it as long as he’d wanted Alana—and he was somewhat ashamed to find that his desire for her didn’t disappear even after he was freed, even after he spent enough time in bed with Hannibal to know that pulling his hair elicited the lowest of growls in his ear. She knew those growls too, he was certain.

They sat together at the end of the long dining table—the one that Will had commandeered that first evening. Hannibal at the head, and Will and Alana on either side like a Latin cross. Hannibal poured his wine and laid his hand on Will’s shoulder. Will passively accepted the gesture and watched his glass fill. Only when Hannibal had taken his seat did he look across the table at Alana. She was watching him with her jaw squared. 

 

“I have to believe that you know what you’re doing,” she told him days later. Their breath left clouds in the freezing air, which tasted metallic. Snow was on its way. “I have to believe that this is helping you in some way and I just can’t see it because I’m not inside your head.” _Not the way he is,_ were the unspoken words that hung between them, loud enough that she might as well have said them anyway.

He shoved his hands in his pockets. It was a new coat that he was wearing. “I’m fine, Alana.”

“You don’t _look_ fine.” They both knew that was a lie; Will had never looked better. The weight he had lost before and during his institutionalization was recovered and then some, his hair and beard were trimmed, and he knew that he was glowing with the assuredness of someone who didn’t sleep alone anymore. “Will, _you don’t look fine,”_ she insisted. “You look worn out. You’re all…” She waved her hands helplessly. “Threadbare. Have you been sleeping?”

“No.” It was the truth; she could take it any way she liked and not be wrong. 

“I think you feed on each other,” she said. “Will, this isn’t good for you.” When Will didn’t immediately respond, she lowered her voice. “I think you know as well as I do what he is.”

“I’m fine,” he repeated.

“Sex can cast a powerful glamour,” she said. “Whatever you have with him, it can’t change what’s happening when you’re not there.” _Or are you not there at all?_ Again, the words hung silent in the air. 

“Well, you’d know all about that, wouldn’t you.”

It was cruel, but he was learning how to be cruel and not care.

 

Jack wasn’t impressed, but he wore the same look that Alana did: concern and not a little guilt. In the privacy of his office, while Will studied the coffee cup full of pens on his desk, he asked him, trying to be blunt as a defense, but casting out for words all the same. _Have you… engaged sexually… at all… with Hannibal…_

As though clinicism could spare them both the embarrassment. 

“Dr. Bloom has been here, hasn’t she,” is all Will said. 

“I would have asked regardless,” Jack said. “I’m not blind, Will. And even if I was, the rest of the FBI isn’t. I’ve had reports that your car hasn’t been outside your own house for quite some time.”

“Do you have me under surveillance?” Will asked.

“You’re a suspect in Randall Tier’s murder, of course we have you under surveillance.”

“Whatever I do,” Will said, “I promise you that it will bring us closer to catching him.”

“And how do I know that when—how do I know that you’re mine?”

It was an oddly phrased question, just adjacent to the sort of question asked by a possessive lover, to the question that Hannibal seemed to ask without speaking whenever he was inside Will, or Will inside him, or even just when they were together, content to exist in each other’s space and say nothing, which was perhaps more intimate than anything they could do in a bed or a shower or against the shelves of his library. _I’d have thought this would be against your principles,_ Will had said when Hannibal pressed him against the books of the library’s second story, nosing into his neck. 

_You cannot desecrate a library with life, Will._

Hannibal had pinned his hands above his head. How vulnerable he had felt, unable to touch him, only able to accept what he was given. He bit his lips bloody as a matter of compensation. He leaned his head back against the shelf behind him and allowed himself the briefest moment to enjoy the heat and pressure of his body on his. Moments were allowed.

Could Hannibal feel how Will held himself back? He wondered it whenever he lay beside him. Don’t feel too much. Accept it as you accepted the killing: with a ready body and willingness to do what was necessary, but always careful not to enjoy it too much. Maintain the distance of a surgeon. Return his kisses with the heat of belief, but don’t let yourself crave them.

The nights he slept at his own house were cold and Will no longer found solace in solitude. Strange to think of those evenings when he was content with the company of his dogs and no one else. Strange to think that now, _now,_ he could wake in Hannibal’s bed and find him sketching in the corner—was it him that he drew? Hannibal was coy and wouldn’t say—or else at the harpsichord downstairs, or else in the kitchen, and Will could follow his nose and be welcomed with a mug of French press coffee. Strange to think that he had at last achieved the intimacy that his previous, more naïve self had longed for every time he fleetingly met Hannibal’s eyes. 

Sometimes he would wake in the darkness and kiss his shoulders and down his arm, down to the delicate skin of his wrist. There was no reason to do it; he couldn’t pass it off as a means to stay in character because Hannibal was asleep and in the darkness, at least, Will did not feel the pressure to have an identity. There was no reason to do it. No reason except that, in the darkness and the silence, no one would know but he and Hannibal. No reason except that Will’s mouth hungered for Hannibal’s skin, and his lips ached to be kissed. And Hannibal would wake and oblige him. Sheets, skin, sweat and saliva, the faint trace of iron in the blood he had drawn on Hannibal’s back earlier in the night. And only then, as he laid his head on Hannibal’s chest and his fingers combed through his hair, would Will allow himself to think that perhaps he wanted to run away with him after all.

He wasn’t in the habit of praying, but he found himself making appeals all the same. 

_So we’ll make a deal, you and I,_ he thought. Hannibal’s hand was heavy on the small of his back. _I’ll finish him myself. Just let me have this. Just one more night. Just one more night. Just one more…_ He was like Scheherazade, telling story after story to keep her head. Or more accurately, he was Desdemona. _Kill me tomorrow, let me live tonight!_ Helpless begging that would do nothing in the end. How could he save himself? How could he save _them?_

“What are you thinking about?” 

He ran his fingertip over Hannibal’s lips. “You.” _How I hate you and I want you and how, in the end, that’s all sort of the same thing._

Hannibal studied his face in the darkness, ran his hand through Will’s hair. “I was dreaming of Randall Tier,” he murmured. “And how we allowed him to be seen at last.”

Will lay one hand on the pillow beside Hannibal’s head, leaned on it. “And how you allowed me to be seen.”

“We’ve seen each other.” 

_And then you swallowed my cock in another wing of the museum,_ Will added silently. Sex, death, sex death, all mercilessly interlaced. 

Hannibal took Will’s free hand and ran the edge of his nail over the nail bed of his thumb. _“‘Murder’s as near to lust as smoke to flame,’”_ he murmured, as though he could read Will’s mind. 

He couldn’t trust himself to make a proper response. 

“They’re going to catch you, Hannibal.”

He didn’t deny it. “And what will you do then?”

His eyes were black and liquid in the darkness. Will swallowed, knowing he was shaking, knowing that Hannibal could smell the fear on him, knowing that the sanctity of the bedroom would not be enough to save him should Hannibal decided that he was too much of a liability. 

“Will?” Eyes like blood in the night, full of uncertainty and, yes, there was trust there too. “What will you do then?”

He bent down and kissed him lightly on the lips.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments are fucking amazing y'all.


End file.
